WASHINGTON - The United States has backed away from high-level peace
negotiations with Sunni insurgent groups after meeting with them regularly over
several weeks in January and February, according to an insurgent leader.
Evidence of wavering by the George W Bush administration over the negotiations
came from the London-based Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper, which reported that Sunni
resistance organizations had just broken off secret talks with Ambassador
Zalmay Khalilzad because of the US failure to respond to a peace proposal from
the insurgents.
The Arab-language newspaper reported that the leader of a Sunni insurgent group
had revealed in an interview that representatives of
more than 10 prominent Iraqi insurgent organizations had met with Khalilzad
seven times starting January 16.
However, the insurgent leader said the US had never responded to a memorandum
of understanding presented to Khalilzad about March 1, despite a promise to do
so before the formation of a new government. He said the insurgents had decided
to end the talks and had delivered a memo to the US Embassy on April 29
informing the US of the decision.
The story was carried by Associated Press with a Dubai dateline. The US Embassy
had no immediate comment on the report, which has not yet been published in
major international media.
The insurgent leader indicated that the proposal included provisions for a US
troop withdrawal, which Bush has repeatedly rejected in the past. However,
Khalilzad was well aware that a timeline for US withdrawal was the centerpiece
of the insurgents' negotiating position from previous contacts with them and
proceeded with the talks anyway.
A document posted on a London-based Iraqi exile group's Internet site, which
was said by Sunni sources with links to the insurgent groups to have reflected
a consensus among major armed organizations on a negotiated settlement, calls
for dismantling of insurgent units "immediately after the full withdrawal of US
and other foreign forces". Both are to be carried out within six months of an
agreement.
It seems unlikely that Khalilzad would have met with the insurgents seven times
in roughly six weeks if he had not been prepared to consider a peace plan that
involved a timeline for US withdrawal. Bush, who approved Khalilzad's talks
with the insurgents, also knew that troop withdrawal would be part of any
agreement.
A more plausible explanation for the failure to respond to the insurgents'
proposal is that military commanders and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
balked at the peace proposal given to the ambassador in late February or early
March and prevailed on Bush to back away from the talks.
Khalilzad has been at odds with the military and the Pentagon over the
direction of US policy in Iraq for several months. At least since October,
Khalilzad has been pursuing a strategy of seeking an accommodation with Sunnis
and putting pressure on the Shi'ites to curb the militias.
Just before and after the December parliamentary election in Iraq, Khalilzad,
evidently with White House approval, got tough with militant Shi'ite leaders
about the threat of sectarian militias. He also began talking openly about
Iran's aspirations for regional hegemony and its influence in Iraq at the same
time that reporters were being told that Iran was funneling money to Shi'ite
political parties.
During the period in which Khalilzad was negotiating intensively with the Sunni
insurgents, and in the weeks that followed, he was threatening to withdraw US
support from the government if the Shi'ites did not give up their control over
the all-important Interior Ministry. In an interview with Knight Ridder on
February 20, he said, "We are not going to invest the resources of the American
people to build forces run by people who are sectarian."
After the dramatic increase in sectarian violence following the bombing of a
Shi'ite temple in late February, Khalilzad began to argue explicitly that the
main problem in Iraq was not the Sunni insurgency but the influence of militant
Shi'ites exercised through militias. In March he said, "More Iraqis are dying
today from militia violence than from the terrorists."
Clearly identifying sectarian militias as the primary threat in Iraq could be a
justification for continuing negotiations aimed at making peace with the
insurgents should the White House accept such a policy.
But that line was apparently not supported by Rumsfeld's Pentagon or by most
military commanders in Iraq. They were focused on the mission of creating an
Iraqi army that could carry on the war against the Sunni insurgents, which they
now define as military success in Iraq.
The Pentagon officials and the US command in Iraq had ignored a series of
warnings from Iraqi and US Embassy officials about the rapidly growing power of
sectarian - primarily Shi'ite - militias in 2004 and 2005. Tom Lasseter of
Knight Ridder reported on April 17 that the Iraqi interior minister from June
2004 to April 2005, Falah al-Naquib, said he personally raised the militia
problem with Rumsfeld and others, but "they didn't take us seriously".
The US command's spokesman, Major General Rick Lynch, admitted at a briefing
last month that the problem of militias "wasn't a problem set we focused on".
Adopting a firm policy against Shi'ite militias would have conflicted with the
main interest of military command and the Pentagon, because it would have
reduced political support for the prosecution of the war against Sunni
insurgents.
The circumstantial evidence suggests that the policy debate within the
administration over the issue of redefining US priorities in Iraq was closely
related to the consideration by the White House of the insurgents' peace
proposal during the same March-April period.
Khalilzad clearly wanted a decision that the insurgency had now been eclipsed
by the problem of sectarian violence. Others in the administration preferred to
avoid any clear choice between the two problems. The two positions on that
question were almost certainly related to the more immediate issue of what to
do about a peace proposal from the insurgents that required a timeline for US
withdrawal. Khalilzad wanted to continue negotiating on the proposal; the
military did not.
The struggle over peace negotiations thus provides the political backdrop for
an unusual joint statement by Khalilzad and General George W Casey, the senior
US commander in Iraq, which was published in the Los Angeles Times on April 11.
Ostensibly yet another administration exhortation to the public to stay the
course in Iraq, that statement contains a carefully worded compromise on the
issue of US priorities. It states that "the principal threat to stability is
shifting from an insurgency grounded in rejection of the new political order to
sectarian violence grounded in mutual fears and recriminations".
The compromise formula of a shift in priorities that is under way but not
complete suggests that the Pentagon prevailed on Bush to pull back from
negotiating a ceasefire and eventual troop withdrawal. Considering that the
embassy has not informed its contacts in the insurgency that there can be no
deal, however, that same compromise may mean that Bush is reluctant to preclude
peace negotiations in the future.
Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. His
latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to
War in Vietnam, was published in June 2005.
